There’s something fascinating about looking at the arc of a person’s career. So often we start out thinking we are going to be one thing, and over the years we move in a different direction and end up doing something else entirely.

Ms. Laporte started out with dreams of being a doctor and, after getting a biology degree at Yale University, she applied to go to medical school at both Stanford and Harvard (she was accepted at both, which tells you something about her ability). But somewhere along the way she realized that being a doctor was not for her and so she started thinking about other directions. The one she ultimately chose was business.

And she went about it in style. After gaining experience with a number of firms she teamed up with some colleagues to start New Leaf Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley.

A profile of her in the Silicon Valley Business Journal described her as “smart, thorough and solution-oriented, Ms. LaPorte has spent nearly her entire professional life in venture capital — something of a rarity — and is considered a quick study by those who have worked with her.”

But it’s not just her business acumen that earned her the respect of colleagues and an appointment to our Board by State Treasurer Bill Lockyer. It’s also her experience working in the biotech and healthcare field, evaluating and mentoring later stage biotech companies and early stage medical device and diagnostic companies.

“I’m honored to be joining the Board, and excited about CIRM’s mission to bring new regenerative medicine therapies to patients with chronic diseases,” says Ms. LaPorte. “I hope my experience from 28 years of helping to finance and guide the work of passionate scientists and entrepreneurs, enabling their ideas to get to the people who really need them, will be helpful to the CIRM team.”

In a news release announcing the news, Jonathan Thomas, the Chair of our Board, said:

“We are thrilled to have Kathy join us on the ICOC. As a representative of a life science commercial entity she brings with her a wealth of knowledge and expertise in biotech and business development for healthcare companies and products. Her keen intellect and analytical skills are going to be terrific assets for the Board.”

Ms. LaPorte’s career took a few twists and turns before it led to us, but we’re delighted it brought her here, and we welcome her to the Board.

Change is never easy. We all get used to doing things in a certain way and it can sometimes be difficult to realize that the way we have chosen, while it may have worked well at one time is perhaps not the best way to achieve our goals at this time. Well, change is coming to the stem cell agency.

It’s not surprising that our new President & CEO, C. Randal Mills, Ph.D., would want to introduce some of his own ideas about how best to run the agency in the current moment of stem cell science. After all, it’s those ideas that landed him the job in the first place. Now Randy wants us to develop a clearer focus, one that is more aligned with his 4-point criteria for assessing everything we do.

Will it speed up treatments to patients

Will it increase the likelihood of successful treatments for patients

Does it target an unmet medical need

Is it efficient.

That new focus begins with re-imagining how we can be most effective in the way we fund research. Right now we put out what’s called an RFA or Request for Application, telling people who have promising projects in a particular area of stem cell research to submit an application and if they are successful they’ll get up to $20 million, depending on the kind of project.

The problem is, we often have long gaps between each round of funding and so a company or institution with a promising therapy will sometimes have to wait as much as a couple of years before they can apply again. If they do wait and are successful in their application it could still be another year or two before they are able to gain actual funding and begin a clinical trial. But when lives are at stake, you can’t afford to wait that long. So we’re looking at ways of speeding things up, making it easier for the best science to get the funds needed when they are needed.

At our Board meeting yesterday Randy outlined some broad concepts about what he wants to do and how it can be done. It’s part of his vision for the agency, a new focus that he is calling CIRM 2.0 (with acknowledgments to Dr. Paul Knoepfler who coined the term earlier this year)

As with any simple idea it’s really complicated. We need to achieve greater speed, to streamline the way we do things, without sacrificing the quality of the review process because we need to ensure that we only fund the best science.

In the months to come, as the precise details about these proposed changes are fine tuned, the Board will hear in greater detail how this will work and, as always, it will be up to them to decide if they think it’s a good idea.

Either way it will start a conversation about how we can become more efficient and more effective at living up to our mission, of accelerating therapies that target patients with unmet medical needs. And that always has to be a good thing.

For more details about the other big events at yesterday’s Board meeting, including awarding $16 million to ViaCyte to help it advance its promising therapy for type 1 diabetes, you can read the news release posted on our website.